One of the many benefits of our relationship with some of our clients is our ability to deploy a number of ongoing customer relationship management programs throughout the year. This level of interaction enables us to test a number of critical variables (such as medium, offer, creative, etc.) and the corresponding response rates and ROI impact. This kind of partnership allows us to be the best of who we are: analytics + imagination = results!
One critical finding that appears every time is the major increase experienced when communicating with prospects via both direct mail and email when both contact forms exist. Standalone emails and mail-only campaigns produce positive ROI and should of course be continued when only one contact variable exists. That said, the combination of deploying both email and direct mail to an individual dramatically improves the campaign ROI. In one customer’s case, conversion percentage was recently as follows: 1% for email only, 5% for mail only and 10% for mail and email combined.
I know budgets are getting tight and companies are trying to save money by just sending emails. However, it is important to not lose sight of best practices and to deploy the right strategy - not just the cheapest. In almost every case, existing or past customers will be the best source of future revenue. Until marketers have 100% of their customers’ email addresses, direct mail is a necessity to reach all past customers.
Most importantly besides costs, when both email and mail addresses are leveraged, the results and impact on ROI can be dramatic. In another recent campaign, we tested a mail-only campaign, an email-only campaign and one that utilized both. Even though the mail plus email campaign involved a smaller target, it yielded 35% more revenue than the mail-only campaign and 133% more revenue than the email-only campaign.
We are in an era of smart, analytics-based marketing. It is critical to stay true to best practices in order to deploy campaigns that maximize impact even on limited budgets.
December 8th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Another good way to give your response rates a boost is to use personal urls. An example of a Personal URL would be: yoursite.com/Jim.Smith and when “Jim” visits his personal url, the website will usually be customized to him. Personal URLs used to be difficult and expensive, but I recently created an application that is not only affordable, but extremely easy to use. You can check it out at: http://purlem.com.